"Good," Phillipe said. He reached into his bag then opened that little tin box with the maps in it again. He spread the map out on his lap. "Tyro, Ginger, come here."
I walked over and looked at the map. It was a lot nicer than the maps I had, though I wasn't sure if all dungeon maps used a similar scale. Were they all made by the same people? That... would make sense. Send someone down with a [Mapmaking] skill and let them draw out the entire dungeon, then sell those maps to any delvers who were going to head down themselves.
"We're here," Phillipe said as he tapped a room smack in the middle of the floor. It was obviously where we were, a long, rectangular room with a single entrance and two doorways leading away. "This path southwards goes to two rooms that don't matter to us."
I glanced to that door, then back to the map. "There's a south in the dungeon?" I asked.
"Yes. Compasses still work," Tyro said.
"Huh," I muttered. That was... good to know, I supposed. Did that mean that radios would work down here as well? I almost smacked myself when I remembered the strings of lights on the first floor. Obviously, electricity worked just fine, so something like a radio signal should too. Though maybe the thickness of the floors and the depth would reduce the efficiency of any signal so much that it would be pointless.
"Our path to the fifth floor up through here," Phillipe said as he traced a route up. "That's five rooms to clear."
"More goblins and slimes, or will we have to deal with something else?" Tyro asked.
I looked at the map for another little bit, trying to memorise what I could of it before I nodded. "Alright," I said as I stood and slung my bag on. "So how do we do this? Slow and careful?"
"Slow and careful is how you want to do everything in a dungeon," Phillipe said. "Do you have enough of those poison-cloud mushrooms to clear the path all the way to the end?"
"Five rooms, call it four per room, yeah, I have enough, but then I'll be down to just a few mushrooms once we reach the next floor."
"But you can resupply once we're there?" he asked.
I nodded slowly. I could. I'd even taken some of the mycelium from the mushrooms I'd just grown and wrapped them up carefully. They could be transplanted with relative ease, making it easier to grow the next batch. There was one other thing though, something I hadn't expected but probably should have.
The mushrooms I grew down here weren't the same as those I grew back on my farm.
[Magical Dead Man's Cough] - Rare
A mushroom filled with highly toxic, magical spores. Inhalation of these spores will cause immediate inflammation in the inhaler's lungs, followed by trance-like hallucinations and internal haemorrhaging, possibly leading to death.
I had to find an excuse to grab a few of the spores once they were unleashed to study them and how the magical-ness they'd gained changed their lethality. I was operating under the assumption that they were more dangerous now than before, but for all I knew that wasn't the case at all.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
I hated unknown variables like that, and I hated that I wasn't alone with time to study and discover what I was working with.
Some other mushrooms I'd grown had come out with the same modifier to their name. [Magical Brownbottle] and [Magical Healing Bottle] and [Purple Mageballs].
Why hadn't the [Purple Ghoul Watcher] and [Blackbottle Night Watcher] gained the 'magical' thing to their name, and why hadn't their properties changed at all? I had a few simple hypotheses, but absolutely no way to test anything. It was frustrating.
"Alright," Phillipe said as he tucked the map away in its little tin and closed it up tight. "Let's head out."
I made sure all of my gear was on correctly, then I pulled Sir Nibbles off the rock he was resting on. The panbadger groaned as I lifted him up. He was all toasty from sleeping next to the fire for so long.
Phillipe took the lead this time, opening one of the doors along the sides of the room and pressing into a corridor that soon proved to be filled with the same sort of basic traps as the rest of the dungeon.
The only exception was a pitfall trap with a few lethargic slimes at the bottom instead of a pit full of crude spikes.
On reaching the end of the corridor, Phillipe dropped to one knee next to the door, then he very carefully opened it up and peeked through to the other side. "Goblins," he said. "And slimes. Same as earlier. I count... twelve goblins. There's a slime farm to the left. If they break the wall of the farm we'll be swarmed by slimes. We need to take them all out quickly or quietly to stop that. Or we can choose to deal with the consequences."
"What if we just smoke them out?" I asked. I leaned to the side to see out of the crack in the doorway. The room beyond was poorly lit. All the lighting came from a single lamp on a pole sticking out of the middle of the room. The room looked like some sort of ancient greenhouse, with knee-high planters running across the room, though a number of them had been ripped apart and turned into little goblin homes.
The slime farm Phillipe mentioned was a space to one side, with boards stacked up to hip-height and held in place by ropes and a few bent nails. Not the kind of construction I'd expect to see last through even a mild bit of fighting.
If that was holding back a few dozen slimes, then we'd have to deal with it. If it was holding back some of those greater slimes, then... yeah, no, I didn't want to have to fight that kind of thing again, especially not more than one.
The goblins in the room were shuffling around, doing their own things, so we hadn't been noticed yet.
"If we can pop a single [Dead Man's Cough] and let the spores travel through the room, we might be able to take them out without them noticing that they're under attack," I said.
"And how would we manage that?" Phillipe asked.
I thought about it for a while. For ideal dispersion, we'd want the mushroom to burst in the air so that the falling spores would be able to spread far across the room. We probably couldn't do it with more than one without being noticed, which meant there was no way to properly saturate the entire space.
"How good is your aim?" I asked.
"Can you toss a mushroom so that it arcs over and lands in that slime farm thing?" I asked.
He looked out again, then nodded. "I can land that throw," he said.
"Can you hit the mushroom in mid-air with a rock hard enough to pop it without throwing it off-course?" I asked.
His eyebrows rose. "That's a much harder thing to ask."
"Well, can you do it?" I asked.
Phillipe frowned. "Maybe?"
"I can toss a rock at the same time," Tyro said. "Double our chances."
"Why do you want the mushroom to land in the slime farm?" Phillipe asked.
"They'll eat the evidence. The idea is that we don't want them to know they're under attack until they're on the ground gasping," I said. Reaching into my satchel, I pulled out a nice, fat [Magical Dead Man's Cough] and hefted the mushroom. "So, do you think you can do it?" I asked.
He shrugged. "No harm in trying. If it doesn't work, then we'll have to do things with a bit more elbow grease." And saying that, he plucked the mushroom I was holding on to. "Get ready Tyro, we'll have one good shot at this."